ARTE TV Guide

ARTE TV Guide and ARTE+7 integration module.

ARTE, the french/german cultural TV channel, was looking for a contractor to help maintain their TV Guide (EPG) and continue its development by adding new features.

The solution

Novelys was quick to respond to their demand by letting one of its Senior Rails developper get on par with the development. He was quick to immerse himself in the source code of the application.

The app is a "not so typical" Rails application: it has no storage layer, all business objects are queried through an internal private API.

The TV Guide serves 10M page views per month on average (and growing) and is a completely internationalized website, with french and german translations and localisations available for every page.

That's why performance monitoring was setup on the whole application by our team and corrective actions were taken to improve the performance on several fronts: first on the API front (limit the number of queries on the internal API) and then on the user's perceived performance (limit the number of images loaded at once for example).

The ARTE+7 module is a new addition since we took over the project. It's a visually integrated module of the catchup service of ARTE.

Available movies on the catchup service are displayed through a carousel on desktop and tablet. Main and secondary filters are available to help you find the program of your choice.

Performance on this module was improved through the time to limit the number of ressources loaded by the page the first time its displayed.

As the whole ARTE TV Guide, the ARTE+7 module is completely responsive. Therefore the interface shown to mobile phones is slightly different.

Once again, performance was a feature from day one. Indeed, viewing this page on a phone on a 3G network can be very deceptive if the page is not very quick.